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Azathoth123 comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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Steve Sailer
Agree with the general point, though I think people complaining about dates in history are referring to the kind of history that is "taught" in schools, in which you have to e.g. memorize that the Boston Massacre happened on March 5, 1770 to get the right answer on the test. You don't need that level of precision to form a working mental model of history.
You do need to know dates at close to that granularity if you're trying to build a detailed model of an event like a war or revolution. Knowing that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Hong Kong both happened in 1941 tells you something; knowing that the former happened on 7 December 1941 and the latter started on 8 December tells you quite a bit more.
On the other hand, the details of wars and revolutions are probably the least useful part of history as a discipline. Motivations, schools of thought, technology, and the details of everyday life in a period will all get you further, unless you're specifically studying military strategy, and relatively few of us are.
A particularly stark example may be the exact dates of bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and official surrender. Helps deal with theories such as "they had to drop a bomb on Nagasaki because Japan didn't surrender".
Be careful. That sounds reasonable until you also learn that the Japanese war leadership didn't even debate Hiroshima or Nagasaki for more than a brief status update after they happened, yet talk of surrender and the actual declaration immediately folowed declaration of war by the Soviets and landing of troops in Mancheria and the Sakhalin islands. Japan, it seems, wanted to avoid the German post-war fate of a divided people.
The general problem with causation in history is that you often don't know what you don't know. (It's a tangential point, I know.)
I'm not necessarily saying this is wrong, but I don't think it can be shown to be significantly more accurate than the "bomb ended the war" theory by looking at dates alone. The Soviet declaration of war happened on 8 August, two days after Hiroshima. Their invasion of Manchuria started on 9 August, hours before the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, and most sources say that the upper echelons of the Japanese government decided to surrender within a day of those events. However, their surrender wasn't broadcast until 15 August, and by then the Soviets had opened several more fronts. (That is, that's when Emperor Hirohito publicized his acceptance of the Allies' surrender terms. It wasn't formalized until 2 September, after Allied occupation had begun.)
Dates aside, though, it's fascinating to read about the exact role the Soviets played in the end of the Pacific War. Stalin seems to have gotten away with some spectacularly Machiavellian moves.
That was my point. It can be shown to be significantly more accurate, but not by looking at the dates alone.
This tells me that the order of events is important, and not the actual dates themselves. It is true that, if I want to claim that X caused Y, I need to know that X happened before Y; but it does not make any difference whether they both happened in 1752 or 1923.
Dates are a very convenient way of specifying the temporal order of many different events.
The time between them also matters. If X happened a year before Y it is more plausible that X caused Y then if X happened a century before Y.
Great. I have approximately 6000 years worth of events here, happening across multiple continents, with overlapping events on every scale imaginable from "in this one village" to "world war." If you can keep the relationships between all those things in your memory consistently using no index value, go for it. If not, I might recommend something like a numerical system that puts those 6000 years in order.
I would not recommend putting "0" at a relatively arbitrary point several thousand years after the events in question have started.
I do agree that an index value is a very useful and intuitive-to-humans way to represent the order of events, especially given the sheer number of events that have taken place through history. However, I do think it's important to note that the index value is only present as a representation of the order of events (and of the distance between them, which, as other commentators have indicated, is also important) and has no intrinsic value in and of itself beyond that.
It's not just the order but the distance that matters. If you want to say that X caused Y, but X happened a thousand years before Y, chances are that you're at the very least ignoring a lot of additional causes.
In the end, I think, dates are important. It's only the arbitrary positioning of a starting date (e.g. Christian vs. Jewish vs. Chinese calendar) that genuinely doesn't matter; but even that much is useful for us to talk about historical events. I.e. it doesn't really matter where we put year 0, but it matters that we agree to put it somewhere. (Ideally we would have put it somewhat further back in time, maybe nearer the beginning of recorded history, so we didn't have to routinely do BCE/CE conversions in our heads, but that ship has sailed.)
Or that the interval between X and Y is spacelike, and neither is in the other's forward light cone... :)
Some day the light speed delay might become an issue in historical investigations, but not quite yet :) Even then in the statement "if you claim that X caused Y, the minimum you need to know is that X came before Y, not afterwards" the term "before" implies that one event is in the causal future of the other.
"Dateless history" can be interesting without being accurate or informative. As long as I don't use it to inform my opinions on the modern world either way, it can be just as amusing and useful as a piece of fiction.